Description

Discovered in 1985 by the Rice University research team headed by Richard Smalley, Robert Curl, Jr., and Sir Harold Kroto, carbon-60, also known as buckminsterfullerene or a buckyball, is an allotrope of carbon that has a molecular shape similar to a soccer ball or a geodesic dome of futurist architect R. Buckminster Fuller. Extremely stable and capable of conducting electricity, buckyballs opened up a new area of study in fullerenes, which are being explored for their potential in nanotechnology, electronics, optics, and other material-science fields.

In the discovery of buckyballs, pulsed laser beams directed at a sample of carbon in the main chamber of the AP2 instrument created a plume of vaporized carbon hotter than the temperature at which some stars are formed. A stream of helium brought about sudden and extreme cooling and the clustering of carbon atoms. A skimmer at the threshold of an adjacent vacuum chamber collected the clusters for analysis by a mass spectrometer.

Smalley, Curl, and Kroto shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for “their discovery of fullerenes.”